Charles de Gaulle Airport, Terminal 2E, Three Days Later, 4:20 PM
Lily paused in front of the duty-free shop. The glass display cases held expensive perfumes, jewelry, watches—things she once took for granted, later lost, and could now easily buy again.
$85 million. That number still slept in the trust account, releasing only a basic living allowance monthly. James's report yesterday: over the past six weeks, the portfolio had grown by $217,000. Passively.
She remembered the self in the Paris apartment with only €87.42. The self haggling with market vendors. The self walking forty minutes across the city to save a metro ticket.
In those moments, she was free.
Now, standing in this temple of luxury, she felt only weight.
"Mademoiselle, besoin d'aide?" A sales assistant smiled, her eyes already assessing Lily's attire—Chloé's chosen travel outfit: cashmere cardigan, black trousers, soft leather flats. Simple looking, actually expensive.
"Non, merci." Lily turned away.
At the gate, she checked her Paris Bloom records one last time. Six weeks, 142 moments. Mostly private, only three shared publicly:
Duval Institute Studio, 3:17 AM: "Creativity like a storm, I stand in the rain with arms wide open." Likes: 12 (all classmates).Shakespeare and Company, rainy afternoon: "Found my own reflection in Proust's words." Likes: 8.Steps of Sacré-Cœur, sunrise: "Paris taught me: you can kiss a city without marrying it." Likes: 23—including one stranger, ID "ShadowWalker," profile picture all black, no other info.
ShadowWalker. Lily clicked on the user's profile. Blank. No moments, no bio, following 0, followers 0. But over the past six weeks, he had liked all her public moments—only three total, but each within minutes of posting.
Odd, but not worth dwelling on. Maybe a shy classmate.
The boarding announcement sounded. Flight AF006 to New York.
Lily put away her phone and joined the queue. Just as she passed through the gate, in the shadows of the VIP lounge in the distance, a man lowered his newspaper.
Kyle Night.
He wore a dark grey suit today, blending with the business travelers. But his way of reading the paper was peculiar—not reading, but letting his gaze idly sweep over Lily's figure, then away, then back again.
For the past six weeks, he had "coincidentally" also been in Paris.
Not stalking—at least not entirely. The Night family had assets in Paris: a private bank, two properties, art collections accumulated over centuries. Kyle had legitimate reasons for regular visits.
Only this visit's timing happened to overlap with Lily's course.
He stayed in the same arrondissement, visited her frequented cafés, even once sat on the second floor of Shakespeare and Company, watching her browse old books downstairs. He didn't approach, didn't make contact, just observed.
Like observing an interesting experiment: What is Lily Thorne like when stripped of wealth's halo?
The results were unexpected.
He saw her reject Pierre's patronage (learned via gallery surveillance), leave Giovanni's kitchen (the bistro had Night family investments), distance herself from Sophie, see through Thomas's lie.
He saw her frenzy in the studio at 3 AM, saw the ideas on her whiteboard—Ava captured those images via the school's network cameras; Kyle spent a whole night studying "Emotional Pattern Analysis" and the "Hope Algorithm."
This girl showed not only kindness in helping a stranger, resilience in adversity, clarity in the face of wealth.
She also had intelligence. Profound, systematic, empathetic intelligence.
Kyle set down the newspaper and took out his phone. An encrypted channel had a new message from the Swiss clinic:
"Mr. Elias briefly regained consciousness this morning. Repeated three words: 'The key is near.'"
The key.
Kyle looked towards the gate. Lily had passed through, her figure disappearing into the jet bridge.
He stood up and walked towards his own gate—not economy, but first class. Coincidentally, the same flight.
This wasn't part of the plan. Originally, he came to observe, then return to New York for family business. But his grandfather's words, Lily's performance in Paris, and those gleaming ideas on her whiteboard...
Something was shifting. Deep in his heart, frozen for 127 years, a gear began to turn, with the grating sound of rust.
As the plane took off, Kyle sat by the window, watching Paris shrink into a toy model below. Rows back in economy, Lily was opening her laptop, continuing to refine Bloom 2.0's architecture.
Between them lay thirty meters of physical distance, and worlds of cognitive distance.
But what she didn't know was that their trajectories of fate had subtly curved over six weeks in Paris, heading towards an inevitable intersection.
And Kyle Night, who had lived over a century, witnessed the rise and fall of empires, financial storms, countless human joys and sorrows, felt for the first time an emotion akin to... anticipation.
He wanted to see what would happen when Lily Thorne returned to New York, with her Bloom 2.0 and Parisian lessons.
He wanted to see if, when the "key" met the "lock," it would open a door even he hadn't imagined.
Outside the window, the Atlantic's darkness began to swallow the last daylight.
The plane flew east, chasing the departed dusk.
And thirty thousand feet below the plane, in the deep sea, ancient creatures glowed in the dark, unaware of the metal container in the air.
Just as Lily was unaware of the presence a few rows away.
But soon. Very soon.
New York awaited.